Anthropologist Michael Paolisso (right) talks with waterman John van Alstine at the beginning of this year’s crab season in early April.
a murky situation The past decade has been particularly precarious for the blue crab population.“We went from several good years in the mid-1990s, when crabs were doing well, to several years where there was a low abundance, yet we were still harvesting a high percentage of the population,” Lipton says.“That led to a fear that we were putting that resource in danger—we were harvesting at a rate that we really hadn’t harvested at before.” By the summer of 2000, the situation had reached a critical point, and the state stepped in with new regulations that included increasing the size of a legal crab catch by one-quarter of an inch. Soon thereafter, Lipton was asked by state regulators to look at the costs versus benefits of the new regulations being implemented. “We had already been collecting information for stock assessments of the blue crab,” says Lipton.“But this time, we looked in much greater detail at the human impact of the regulations—how these new rules were going to affect the watermen and seafood processors.” The motivation for this expanded assessment came from the top down. John Griffin, recently appointed as secretary of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, held the same position under former governor Parris Glendening. Griffin, along with Doug Lipton, attended a meeting with watermen in fall of 2000, where the DNR secretary proposed doing things differently.“I told them that I was willing to temporarily freeze any new regulations on blue crab resources, if we would instead invest this time in looking at a new way of doing business,” Griffin recalls.This “new way” meant that watermen, scientists and resource managers would try and work together to better manage the blue crab’s fragile ecosystem.
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“we all work with crabs …” In 2003, a University of Maryland social scientist helped to spearhead a Maryland Sea Grant-sponsored collaborative learning project. “We recognized that although there were strong disagreements among blue crab stakeholders concerning some of the science and regulations, there were also some deep-rooted cultural beliefs that everyone did agree upon—and those issues were not being discussed,” explains Michael Paolisso, associate professor of anthropology. What the watermen, scientists and regulators shared at a deeper, cognitive level, Paolisso says, were beliefs and values about the importance of saving the crab, and why. Paolisso wanted to bring these groups together, and then use anthropological approaches to “dredge up” these implicit, cognitive models about the blue crab fishery and the blue crab population. He began organizing a series of workshops and workplace exchanges—marine scientists would go out on the workboats with the watermen, and watermen would go to the offices or laboratories of the scientists.“They just got to know each other better,” Paolisso says. At the first in a series of workshops held from Annapolis to the lower Eastern Shore,“they locked horns on some crab pot regulations,” Paolisso says.The second meeting went better, and by the third meeting, they had stopped talking about stock assessments or specific crab regulations and started talking in earnest to each other on the topic of “work.” “We were able to identify that everyone here works on crabs— they make their living based on crabs. Some manage them, some study them, and some harvest them, but we all work with crabs,” Paolisso says.“We found common ground, and then worked back up to the points where there was disagreement.”
PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI